In this episode, I'm going to explain to you exactly what an

ADHD business coach like myself actually does. Squirrel.

Hi, I'm Katie McManus, business strategist and money mindset coach, and

welcome to the Weenie cast. Sometimes I

get this question, what does an ADHD business coach

do? And it's a fair question because there's not a lot of us out there.

Also, you know, business coaching is kind of a new thing. Before,

if you wanted to start a business, you kind of had to figure it out

on your own. You had to get a mentor, maybe go to business school.

And thanks to the Internet and thanks to how the world

works these days, that's no longer necessary to start

a successful business. However, it's a lot easier if you have

someone who is guiding you, teaching you what you don't know that you don't know,

answering questions that you didn't know that you needed to ask,

and shining light on common pitfalls that

you wouldn't know were there if you didn't have the right support.

So basically, an ADHD business coach, the short of it,

is someone who helps you start your business and scale it. To

a point that you feel it's successful. They do this in a way

that works with your ADHD and isn't

trying to force you into the quote unquote neurotypical way of

doing things. Now, before

we jump into what I do that's different, let's talk about

the different supports that are out there that do not work

for ADHD business owners and why they don't

work. The typical business programs that are out there

that are by people who started a business, they did

a certain sequence of steps, and then they turned around, turned

their process into a program and started showing people exactly what

they did. These programs don't work for us. The one size fits

all business plan is a bad match for people with

ADHD for numerous reasons. First and

foremost, just because it worked for someone else, we're not

going to believe inherently that it's going to work for us, whereas

neurotypicals are going to have a lot of trust that this whole process, well, if

it worked for them, it'll work for me too, because that's how their whole life

has gone for us. Things working for someone

else doesn't mean shit. If you think

back to different goals that you've had throughout your life, like maybe a

diet, maybe you were trying to lose 20 pounds and you followed a diet that

worked for someone else, well, it didn't work for you because sometimes you needed

dopamine snacks and you fell off the wagon and you completely lost trust

in yourself. How neurotypical people

have learned how to budget from their world. We

don't understand how that works. It does not work for us when

we need to make an impulse buy because we need that dopamine

hit. All budgets go out the window. Right? And of course, this

is different for every single ADHD person. So even

a plan that's specific to ADHD people around any

of these things that makes allowances may not work for every single

ADHD person. Oftentimes in these programs, the

instructions are way too long.

We can't sit still and absorb every single

detail the way a neurotypical person can. It's not even that

we can't do it. It's that we have too much trauma from

school where we screwed it up. So as we're going

through these really detailed instructions for this business building

program, we're going to start assuming that we're missing a

piece. It's this fear that bubbles up underneath

everything, where you start doubting that this is going to work for you because, oh,

my God, I wasn't able to follow the instructions on that project in

bio. I wasn't able to follow the instructions at that one job

I had in college. What's going to be different here? There

must be something that I'm missing. And one of the reasons that this is

so hard for us is that we don't work linearly. We bounce

around, and most of these programs are designed

linearly. There's also this factor of when a person with

ADHD goes to start a business and they sign up for one of these programs,

and I speak from experience here because I signed up for pretty much all of

them. You get to a certain point in lesson three where you're like, this doesn't

fit my personality. That's not my strength. This

is not what I want to be spending my time on. And

as we all know, when we decide something's not the right fit,

when we decide that something isn't something that we want to do, we

are masters at avoiding doing it, which sucks

if it is a foundational building block of that

program. And then it feeds into this story that we have on ourselves

that we just don't finish stuff, that we sign up for things and we can't

see them through, and that we screw things up and that for some

reason, things just don't work for us the way that they work for other people.

So we have a ton of doubt. We

have things that we don't want to do in here. We have moments

where we've tuned out for the last 20 minutes of this 47 minutes

long video, and then we got frustrated that we have to rewind because

we weren't sure which part was useful.

By the way, this is one of the reasons why the videos that I have

in all of my programs are really short. Sweet. To

the point. Okay. Because you don't need to hear about my grandma and what she

taught me about clipping roses and what that has to do with you doing market

research, okay? It doesn't. When I create a video for any of

my programs, I'm telling you, here's what you need to do. Here's how

you need to do it. And if you're not sold on that, then here's why

it's so important for your business. And then I give you very clear

instructions about how you go and do it. And then your job is to

go and do it, not to watch the next video. In addition to all

of this, when we get frustrated with something, when it doesn't feel like

the right fit, or maybe the person who's in these videos,

who's running the program says something that. Doesn'T hit us correctly,

we then get. What I call frustration

defiance. And this is where our ADHD temper. Kind of comes

out, right? Because when we get frustrated with something. Our fuse gets

very short. I want you to think of the last time

you woke up late. The hot water heater had turned off in the middle of

the night, so you had to take a cold shower. Things started just going wrong

from the beginning of the day. And think about the point where you.

Blew up at someone. It's happened to all of

us. And unfortunately for people with ADHD, when things

start going wrong or we fart, we fart. When we start

feeling really frustrated, we kind of snap. And whoever is in the

vicinity then becomes the enemy. Not forever in

most cases, but when. We'Re in a scenario

where we're trying to do something, we spent a lot. Of money on it, and

the thing. That we're trying to do becomes really frustrating. We then

aim that frustration at the person who created it. And

when we start getting angry at. Them, when we start getting upset

with. What they set up for us, that. Makes us feel like a failure. It

doesn't matter if the rest of. The things that they tell us are. Super

helpful, if they fit our personality. If they fit our strengths,

because we've changed our mind about liking this person or this

organization. We don't want to do any of it? It's like back in high

school when you had that one teacher who you absolutely hated and so you

refused to. Do homework for their class. It didn't hurt the teacher, it hurt

you. But you'd be damned if you're going. To do

anything that made their life easier. I'm talking to you, Miss Whitmore.

No, just kidding. Which, by the way, in

junior year of high school, she literally

asked the whole class what she was doing wrong, that we weren't doing

our homework and all this stuff, and I thought she was being literal. So I

told her the seven things that she was doing that were bad

teaching methods in the middle of the class. It was the only time

in my high school career where I got sent to the principal's office the way

she had asked it. I thought she was being genuine, that she was asking for

feedback. She was not. It was a rhetorical question. And

what was funny is I called a conference with my

guidance counselor, the principal, my parents and her to see

if I could get out of the class. Unfortunately, we were in the third quarter

of the year and they didn't let me. Back to the point.

The one size fits all business building program

model does not work for the ADHD

brain. And I have tested this. I have bought almost

all of them and tried to do all of them,

and I usually fall flat in lesson two or

lesson three. I don't even get halfway through and. I know this

isn't just me. I have a whole group of people that I talk

to who are all like B school dropouts. And if you're not familiar with what

B school is, it's the whole business building program that Marie Forleo

has designed. And promoted over the last decade. The other issue

with a lot of these programs is that there's no quick wins in the

beginning and that's something that is really critical to an ADHD

business. Know, when we're working really hard at

something, when we're putting ourselves out there and being vulnerable and

being brave and doing something we've never done before, we. Need

pretty immediate feedback that it's going well. And the

majority of these programs don't offer any way for that to happen.

So what's different between those programs that are

one size fits all and designed for neurotypical people and working with an

ADHD business coach? Well, I can't speak for other ADHD business

coaches because I don't know their programs, but I can speak for what. I do

with my clients and it's pretty much a four prong

approach. And I say four prong and not four

steps because it's not linear for each and every

client. It's going to be different where we. Start from because they

need a strategy. And a plan that works for their strengths,

that helps them overcome their unique. Challenges,

and that feels aligned to what. Their bigger vision is for this

business.

Prong one, we're talking training because

starting a business, there are a lot of skills that you need to have that

you were never trained on in high school, college, and probably in most of your

jobs. I come from a background in sales and marketing, and

the sales and marketing that I learned in those jobs

were completely different to what I need to do in my business, where I am

selling my own service. So when a client works with

me, there are some basic business skills that I train them on. So

how to sell on a phone call, how to put together a proposal,

how to create content for social media. And this is going to be different for

each and every client because their ideal clients are going to be

buying from different platforms. So it may be TikTok, it may be Facebook, it may

be LinkedIn, it may be Instagram. So we're coming up with

a strategy that's specific to their business and their ideal

clients. We're also identifying what their, and I hate this term,

and please do not gag what their unique thought

leadership is going to be. And I'm not saying that they're going to go out

and be like, hey everyone, I'm a thought leader, you should listen to me.

I'm talking about the different angles. They're going to talk about what

their expertise is. So for know, in my mind, there are three types

of thought leader. There's the expert. The expert is only

interesting to people who are interested in that topic, right? So

Anthony Fauci, who led us all through the Covid-19

pandemic, most of the time no one gives a

crap about what he has to say because what he's talking about, pandemics and

endemics that aren't relevant to us. No one's interested in hearing his take

on it unless you're interested in the specific disease that

he is talking about. Everyone was very interested in

Covid-19 because it impacted all of us. So when you're being

an expert in your thought leadership, you want to be careful

not to alienate people who aren't interested in your topic.

There's also the pointer thought leader. Oprah Winfrey is a great example of

this. She got famous basically having people on her show and pointing

to them and saying they have something worth talking about. A lot of

the books in her book club had to do with personal transformation, so she

got associated with personal transformation. She's not an

expert on personal transformation. She just points to other experts. And

in addition to that, the believer, the believer thought leader Brene

Brown is actually a great example of the believer, who's also

an expert hybrid. She takes the data that she

gets in her research, and she comes up with this belief

system around how we live wholehearted

lives. What does it mean to overcome

the fear of being vulnerable? And she tells stories in a

way that gets us on board with what she believes. You can kind of see

how this is going to be different for each and every client. I also

train them on how they can create offers that their ideal clients

would jump at buying, how to do market research so that they can

determine what their profitable niche is going to be, how to work

on their relationship with money so that they're not afraid of asking

top dollar for their work, and some technical stuff like how do you set up

your billing system, how do you set up an email marketing campaign?

How do you launch a webinar? How do you get people to actually register for

the webinar? And really, for an ADHD business

owner, there's no linear way that I'm training this.

We are bouncing around from different topics

constantly because we have to go where their

interest is, where their hyper focus is in that moment.

If I tried to take one of my ADHD business owner clients

through a linear training program that goes this point

and this point and this point, I would lose them with

one small exception. One of the things that I do with all of my

clients who are just starting their business is I have them

do market research, interviews so that they can really

figure out not only what their profitable niche is, but

exactly what they need to say in their marketing to get them to sign up,

what they need to include in their offer, that will make their offer

a no brainer for those ideal clients. Now, what my clients

don't realize, and maybe I shouldn't even be sharing this on

the podcast, oh, what am I going to say next? Well, you'll have to keep

listening to find out. But first, squirrel, squirrel, squirrel,

squirrel.

Now, what my clients don't realize, and maybe I

shouldn't even be sharing this on the podcast. It's kind of a Mr.

Miyagi move, right? Because very early on, when you're starting. A

business, you need wins. You need little wins that you can celebrate to

see that you're on the right track. When I send my clients out to do

market research interviews, I give them all the instructions. They know exactly what questions

they need to ask, how they get people booked in for those interviews, all that

stuff. And I give them a goal. They have to interview

550 people. Now, this is incredible for

their programs, for whatever offer they are designing, because.

They are going to market, test it before they even go out and market

it. So if they're going and interviewing people and the problem that

they think they're going to solve actually isn't a problem. To their ideal

clients, great. That's not what their offer is going to be. We're going to

redesign it really quick. So that they can start making money. As fast as

possible so it helps. Them feel like they are on the. Right

path and get that immediate feedback. In addition to that,

they get really comfortable asking people to get on the. Phone with

them, which they're going to need to get good at if they

want people to book sales calls in the future. They're also going to

get really good at running those interview calls,

at being the person who's in charge of the timeline, which

again, when they get to the point where they're doing sales calls with their

potential clients, they're going to have to have some skill at. In addition

to this, they're going to start getting those dopamine

drips because they're going to successfully very

early on book people for these interview calls. Those

little wins are enough dopamine to keep them working

in their business for the amount of time that it takes

till they get their first paying client. For the most part, we

bounce around through all the skills training, but that is the thing that I have

most of my clients do. Absolutely. First because I want them to

get that immediate dopamine drip. I want them to market test their

idea. I want to make their marketing easy to do and

designing their offer super simple. But everything else is

completely haphazard depending on what they want. And this is true for my one on

one clients, but it's also true for my group program. If you are a member

of the BYOB program, you'll know that our group calls are all

over the place. And that's okay. Every question that gets asked in

those group calls is useful to everyone in the group call.

And because the majority of us all have adhd,

we can jump really easily from one topic to another

to another, even if they're completely different. And it keeps

it interesting for everyone because we all know what it's like when we're in a

lecture, that's about one thing for a whole hour.

Yeah, it doesn't go so well. So I find this

model of supporting my clients is so helpful for them to stay

engaged not only in the program, but in their businesses so that they

can actually start getting clients and build some momentum. So

that's prong number one is training.

Prong number two is mindset coaching. Again, this

is going to be so different for everyone. Some of my clients come to me

and they have really bad mindset beliefs around their

relationship with money. Others have a more general

scarcity mindset where they're afraid there are no clients out there in the world and

we. Kind of have to bust that myth for them. Others have doubts about what

they can achieve. The smorgasbord of bad

mindsets that we have to work through to have a. Successful business is

vast and never ending. But we have to work through

these. Different mindset blocks before you're

going to be able to have a successful business. This

is one of the reasons why I never guarantee

that my clients are. Going to get a client or make a certain amount of

money at a. Certain point throughout our program, because I've

had clients who for the whole, like.

6912 months we were working together. We were mainly

working on moving them through these mindset blocks with

some moments of training, with some moments of designing their offer, with them

doing market research. But mainly the sessions we're doing

together are, oh my God, I don't believe. I can do this.

And I can't tell you how many of those clients after we've

completed have messaged me. Oh my God, I just got two clients this

week. Oh my God, I just got another. Three clients in the last two

weeks. I had one client message me

recently. That she just got so many clients, she's going to have to

raise her. Rates in the new year. How exciting.

But they wouldn't get there if we didn't do that mindset work.

It's so important. So that's prong two of my

approach. Prong three is

their personal ADHD struggles. Now,

of course, people with ADHD generally have similar struggles,

but for some time, management is

harder than for others. Other clients have

impulse control that they have to work on, especially when it comes

to spending on their businesses. For a lot of my

clients, it's focusing on the thing that they don't want to do in their business,

but they have to because it's just a part of running a business. And for

99.9% of all of my clients, we have to work through

shiny object syndrome. Shiny object syndrome shows up in

how they want to market their work. They may get this wild

hair idea that they should be on Instagram and then invest $2,000 a

month on an Instagram specialist and then realize four months, and that's not where

they should be. They may get an idea of a new program they want to

launch, even though they just launched one program and one the month before

and one the month before. Another ADHD struggle that most

business owners encounter at some point, and I count myself among

them, is rejection sensitivity disorder. And there's so

much potential rejection when you're starting a business. It's not just

rejection when you invite someone to be a client. It's rejection when you post something

and no one likes it. It's rejection when you host a webinar

and only three people sign up for it and only one attends. It's

rejection when you submit your name to speak at an event and you never

hear back from them. There's perceived rejection when you're out with a

bunch of friends and no one asks you how your new business is

going, and you assume that they think it's stupid and that you

shouldn't be doing it, and you've made a massive mistake, even though

they've just had too many drinks and didn't

remember to ask. There's a different way for each person to

work through each one of these struggles. Time management. There are

strategies that work really well for me that will not work for another ADHD

person. Shiny object syndrome is another one. There are things

that will keep you on track that won't work for another one

of my clients. And that's okay. Let's find what works

for you. So we have to work on keeping them

on the single road that leads to Rome, right. That one

offer so that they don't confuse their audience. And a whole other

smorgasbord of shiny object syndrome. Things that pop up

in our day to day.

And then finally, the fourth prong of my approach

is I customize a plan that works for each individual

client. I do this with my one on one clients, and I do this with.

My clients in my group programs. Because here's what

those one size fits all programs don't do.

They don't teach you how to identify what your

big vision is for this business and how to reverse

engineer it into what you need to be doing today

and tomorrow and the day after tomorrow and the day after that, and the day

after that. They don't break down that if you want to make a

certain amount of money in three years, here's what you need to be

charging today to be able to reach that. They don't

break down if you want to work a certain amount of hours

per week. So, for instance, I don't want to work more than 30 hours

a week. My strategy is going to be totally

different from someone who wants to work 10 hours a week or

40 hours a week. When I work with my clients, we're

taking into account what their big goal is, all these other factors of how

much money they want to make, how much time they want to spend in their

business, how much time they want to spend with their family and on vacation, what

they want to spend their time on while they're working in the

business. And we're taking that. And so many other factors,

like their strengths, their weaknesses, the things that they would

rather get their eyes chewed out by an alligator than do.

Which, as you can imagine, it wouldn't just be your eyes getting chewed out.

Alligators have big mouths is what I'm saying. And your eyes are very, very small.

I know I don't have to explain this, but it's kind of fun.

I feel like Dr. Evil right now. Like, I want sharks with laser

beams. I want alligators that

can chew out eyeballs. What was my point again?

Oh, yeah, that's right. There's stuff in your business that you really, really

do not want to do. If you were to follow a one. Size fits

all business plan, that business. Plan might make you do that thing.

Over and over and over again. I don't do that with my clients.

If it's something that you feel completely miserable doing, what we're

figuring out is how you can outsource it best.

An element that runs throughout most of these

prongs is what's going on in your personal

life. As humans. We like saying that we're good

at. Compartmentalizing, and that's bullshit.

We're not. Like, it's one of the most magical things about

humans is how we do one thing is generally how we do everything

else. I can't tell you

how many times I've had a client tell me after we work

on their relationship with money and get them a lot more

comfortable asking for the money that they want. That

they kind of embarrassingly mention to. Me at the end of

our sessions. Like, hey, something I'm noticing is that. Six is

getting a lot better.

Because. They'Re learning to ask for what they. Want in

their money. It's not just staying there, they're getting.

Better at asking for what they want in all other areas of their

life. We suck at compartmentalizing. It does

not work for us, and it's especially true for people with ADHD. So

if you're struggling with something in your personal life, it's going to impact you

in your business. They are interrelated. If you had a fight

with your spouse, it's going to impact your whole day. If your

water heater went out and you have to buy a new one. And it's super

expensive, that's going to. Cause stress in your business.

It's so funny. When clients first start with me in the first few

sessions, the first few group sessions, they

very nervously usually ask, like, am I allowed to talk about a personal

thing? And my answer is always,

of course, because everything that's going on in your personal life is going to

impact your business. And we're not designing a business that

needs a robot of a human to be run. We're designing

a business that can withstand a human who has

emotions, who occasionally gets sick, who occasionally has a

bad day, who occasionally is in executive dysfunction and knows

all the things that they need to do, but can't seem to get themselves to

do it. If we don't design your business to be able to

withstand you running it, your business is not going to

last long because you, my friend, are not a

robot. Some of the results that I'm most proud of, that my clients have

achieved. My client, Lauren Lefkowitz, who started with

me in January of 2021, she was able to leave

her job five months after starting. She hit six figures

in her first year, which is not typical. Like,

if you're thinking you're going to hit six figures in your first year, I would

caution you to be a little more conservative. Don't

plan on it. But because we customized a

strategy that would work specifically to her and her available time. In

the beginning, when she was working her full time job and

designed a program that she felt really proud of selling

that worked for her and her ideal clients, she was able to

accomplish that. My other client, Adam Kimmel, is another

story that I'm really proud of. When he started with me, he was making 2000,

$3,000 a month in his copywriting business. In about seven

months, we were able to up that to $9,000 a

month. We were also able to increase his

revenue for that year by about 50,000, give or

take. And the following year, he made

$150,000, plus or minus some dollars

from his copywriting business. His big goal with all this

was to be able to retire his wife from the job that

she hated. And he did all of this while also working a

full time job. His goal was never to leave the full time job.

So we were able to create a strategy that worked for him to

build this business up to $150,000 a year while

only working about 10 hours a week in his business, including doing

client work. I have clients who work 40 hours a week and make six

figures. I have clients who work half that and make six figures as well.

But I certainly never had a coach like Katie before who was able

to add value on so many different prongs

of my business. Katie's versatility is, I think, the

difference maker that sets her apart from

other coaches that are out there. There are people who can train you on sales,

there are people who can help you with your mindset, there are people who

can help you price a service

or a product. There are people who can help you with market research

and can teach you about social media. And there are people who can

help you with ADHD and can help you turn

some of the typical challenges of ADHD

into superpowers. But I don't think there's anyone who can do all of those

things at the same time. When you're designing a business,

you have to be very specific about what kind of life you want to

have when it's full time because I

can tell you there are a gazillion different ways to start a business and there

are a gazillion different ways to make that business super financially

successful. However, if you're not

intentional about the life you're going to have as you're building

it, guess what? You're not going to have that life. You're not going to trip

and fall and land into your perfect schedule that

optimizes your strengths and outsources the things that are super

challenging to you. If you want to have your ideal business, you

have to have a custom strategy that will help you get

there and to wrap this up, that's the long story

of what an ADHD business coach does. So to answer the

original question, that is what I, an ADHD business

coach, do for my clients.

You. If you're starting a business and you're looking for support,

you need to look for someone who can be dynamic in

helping you overcome each one of these unique ADHD

struggles. And because we have so many episodes on all of these

topics that I've. Just touched on, we are including a. List

of links in the show notes of this episode so you can go.

Check out those episodes. And I want to remind you, if. You'Re starting

a business, if you're in the process of growing your business and you're

feeling frustrated because the resources you've been turning to

don't feel like a fit, or they frustrate you, or you've just

given up on them completely to figure it out on your own and you're ready

to get support that fits you, then I invite you to

book a generate income strategy call with me, and to do so, just

go to forward

slash strategycall. And that link is also in the show notes.

I've had calls with Katie where all of those things

are happening, where Katie is

providing value on firing on

all cylinders, where we go from

my relationship with my kids to

something triggering a traumatic experience,

to a sales call helping me with

pricing an offer, helping me with

getting more leads on social media, to talking about my

operations, and then back to me

forgetting the coffee on top of my car and driving off

all in one session, all in 1 hour

slot. Squirrel, squirrel, squirrel.